Edinburgh village fights quarry expansion due to “earthquake” explosions

Local residents in one of Edinburgh's smallest communities have banded together to fight a plan by a nearby quarry to almost double its size, a move they say will bring “earthquake-like” blasts closer to their homes.

A proposed south-west extension to the Bonnington Mines quarry would move drilling and blasting operations towards the village of Bonnington, just half a kilometer away.

The expansion of “precious” agriculture could bring the quarry “200 meters away” from homes, which residents say have already been left shaken by aggregate mining operations for construction near Ratho.

Quarry owners Breedon are yet to submit full plans, but a pre-application notice submitted to Edinburgh Council last year raised eyebrows in the community, prompting the formation of the Stop the Quarry group.

“We're going to get the shaking, the shaking,” said its founder, Valerie Thrash-Denning. “Is this actually going to destroy homes here? And that's a real concern because we're sitting on the same rock.”

“There's also noise and dust. They certainly shouldn't be working in close proximity to residents, homes and places where people live.

Bonnington Mains Quarry opened in the early 1990s and has produced millions of tonnes of building aggregates since then. It closed in 2011 and reopened again in 2018.

“You can't say, 'Well, you shouldn't live near a quarry,'” Valerie said.

“The quarry came to us. We didn't move in and then complain; the houses were about 200 years old or something.”

Bonnington Village resident Jackie Wright joined the group's effort to oppose the expansion. Her decision to retire led her to realize the full extent of the disruption that explosions can cause.

“If I was at work, I wouldn't know any of this, and there are a lot of people in the village who don't know because they're not here,” she said.

“We've always seen explosions, but it's certainly gotten much worse as the months have gone by.

“You don't know if the roof is going to come down, because you're in a situation where your steel house is shaking.

“We have very, very thick wallpaper on our walls, so I don't know what's cracking behind that. But the whole house is shaking. It's like an earthquake.”

“We've all been affected by this, not knowing it was coming.

“I'm not exaggerating, this is very scary. The worry is that if they get the permissions, there will be more bombings. If they get the green light, the sky is the limit. Almost once a month is bad enough.”

Earlier this year, Brydon asked the council to rescind a rule requiring that levels of excess barometric pressure — the shock waves that travel through the air when explosives are detonated — be kept below 120 decibels when measured at nearby properties.

They said the requirement was “unenforceable and unreasonable” because of difficulties in obtaining accurate measurements. However, councilors did not agree to their request after community councilors and Stop the Quarry members highlighted the impact of the explosions on local residents, which they said had already gone beyond the limit on most occasions. This has since been appealed to the Scottish Correspondent.

Valerie was “delighted” with the councillors’ decision, which went against planning officials’ recommendation to approve it, and came after the campaign had invested “a lot of time and money”.

However, the group now faces an uphill battle against Brydon's expansion plans. Among their biggest challenges will be sifting through thousands of documents — something local civil engineer and Stop the Quarry member Paul Fisher became familiar with while researching the application to remove blast boundaries.

“Looking at it and reading summaries of some of those documents, including the environmental impact assessment, led me to believe that I don't have much confidence in what they're saying,” he said.

“There have been some very misleading statements made, claims made that can't really be justified, and in the wider context of quarries around the world they don't really stand up to scrutiny. I thought I needed to get involved and help local people raise our voices as a community.”

“I have noticed an increase in the volume of heavy truck traffic, and it can only increase if the quarry gets the green light. It is dangerous.

“That's just one aspect, and yet the EIA that Brydon submitted says traffic isn't an issue. And they chose to say the impacts would be minimal. I think that's wrong. I just need to find one thing like that that makes us think I don't trust that much.” In what they say.

Paul added that the “end point of all this” would be that local residents were “scared in their homes”.

“If they get the permission they're looking for, or they'll seek if they eventually apply, we'll be talking about a field that's currently under cultivation, and they'll be starting from the top down, and the whole pattern of working for a period of time will be very different from what we've seen,” said Valerie's husband, Ray.

“It will be closer but also different because they will have to start from one place to start and open the quarry.

“This field is classified as rural, and within the wording of the city plan it is designated as equivalent to a green belt. Within the green belt, you cannot do anything.”

Valerie stressed that the field designated for the quarry expansion is also “excellent agricultural land and countryside that should not be touched.”

“The farmer was saying that that particular area of ​​land, that field has been in the Guinness Book of World Records several times for high productivity,” she said.

“It's completely out of his control, and they're going to dig him out.

“It will be a huge loss of valuable farmland,” Paul added.

Brydon has been contacted for comment.

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